How Mumbai attacks unfolded New details have been slowly emerging about the early stages of the Mumbai terror attacks. Much of the information has been gleaned after the capture of one of the militants involved, as the BBC's Prachi Pinglay reports from Mumbai.
The story of the Mumbai terror attacks likely began when a private fishing trawler with five crew members set sail from the Arabian sea off the coast of Porbandar in India's western Gujarat state on 13 November.
Sometime during the next 12 days, the trawler was taken over at sea by at least 10 young men, aged between 20 and 23 years, carrying backpacks and bags, according to sources in the Mumbai police, coastguard, and commandos.
Investigators still do not know what the men were sailing on and where they were coming from when they took over the trawler - though suspicion has fallen on the Pakistani port city of Karachi.
What they do know is that the men tied up one of the crew in the trawler's engine room, and slit his throat. The abandoned trawler was found by Indian coastguard ships more than three nautical miles off Mumbai. GPS co-ordinates
When coastguards boarded the vessel, they found the dead crew member, plus a satellite phone and GPS tracker that possibly belonged to the trawler's crew.
Investigators told the BBC that the tracker showed "a return mapping for Karachi", leading to speculation that the men who attacked Mumbai had planned to return in the same trawler.
A ferry doing about 20 knots can cover the 506-nautical mile distance between Karachi and Mumbai in a little over 24 hours.
After abandoning the trawler, the men opened the inflatable dinghies they were carrying and sailed into Mumbai waters early on 26 November, a little more than 10 hours before the attack, investigators say.
An abandoned dinghy has been recovered in the sea off one of the many fishing colonies which dot the city's coast.
One of the top investigating officers told the BBC that the gunmen - nine were eventually killed and one arrested - split up into four groups and took the city's rickety black-and-yellow Fiat taxis from the fishing colony at Cuffe Parade to some of the locations they planned to attack.
They say the men left grenades or bombs inside the taxis before they got out. The taxis exploded soon after, killing two drivers and one bystander.
The first round of attacks took place around the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus or the Victoria Terminus railway station, when gunmen entered the platforms and fired on people indiscriminately.
They walked out of the station after the carnage, and shot three policemen and fired at journalists gathered near a cinema to record the event. Then they took a police van and drove off.
A flat tyre forced the gunmen to abandon the police van. The men then stole a Skoda car and drove towards the seafront Marine Drive, just as the other groups of gunmen were attacking a cafe, two luxury hotels and a Jewish cultural centre.
As the Skoda took a zig-zag route through the streets of Mumbai, the men inside opened fire in several locations - including at the Cama and Albless hospital for women and children.
Police say they intercepted the Skoda on the seafront and shot at it, killing one of the gunmen and arresting the other.
Twenty-one-year-old Mohammed Ajmal Mohammed Amir Kasar, who police says hails from Pakistan's Punjab province, is now the investigators' key to unravelling the planning that went into the attacks. 'Senseless violence'
Commandos who fought early pitched battles with the gunmen in the two luxury hotels, the Taj Mahal and Oberoi Trident, say that the lithe attackers moved quickly from room to room and climbed up and down floors to throw them off tracks.
The gunmen set fire to curtains and threw grenades to distract the commandos, according to federal commando chief JK Dutt.
"We found a lot of unexploded grenades inside the hotel. They damaged a lot of property. It was senseless violence," he said.
They also found lots of dry fruits, Indian and American currency, ammunition and fake Mumbai college student identity cards in the bags the gunmen had left behind during the attacks.
"We are checking whether the gunmen had any local support. But what we are sure is that they were not from India, and had trained in and were carrying stuff - AK-56, AK-47 and 9mm revolvers and hand grenades possibly of Chinese make," said an investigator.
The investigators say that Kasar has told them that their work was to "take hostages for safe passage". He also told them their aim was to "create an international incident, and anything big in Mumbai would be noticed all over the world".
[-] Text [+]
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A group based in Pakistan may have been responsible for the attacks by militants in India's financial hub of Mumbai that killed 183 people, a senior State Department official said on Tuesday.
The Pakistani government has offered to cooperate with India to find the attackers amid rising tensions between the two nuclear-armed rivals over the three-day assault at two luxury hotels and other landmarks.
"There are a lot of reasons to think it might be a group, partially or wholly a group, that is located on Pakistan's territory," the official told reporters on the sidelines of a meeting of NATO foreign ministers in Brussels.
The official, who did not identify the source of his information, spoke hours before U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was to leave for New Delhi to discuss last week's attacks with the Indian government.
Indian authorities were warned of an imminent attack by Islamist gunmen who would arrive by sea days before the Mumbai attacks, according to a senior coast guard source in India.
The owner of the city's Taj Mahal hotel, at the center of the militant assault, said he had also received a warning of a possible attack and had stepped up security.
U.S. officials would not publicly comment on reports that the United States had shared intelligence with India warning of a terrorism threat before the attacks, but privately acknowledged that threat information had been passed along.
ABCNews.com, quoting unnamed sources, said U.S. intelligence agencies warned their Indian counterparts in mid-October of a potential attack and specific locations, including the Taj hotel, were listed in the U.S. warning.
"Obviously we try to pass on information to countries all around the world when we pick up information," Rice said at a news conference in Brussels.
But sometimes information described as warnings "are often difficult to act on, sometimes not very concrete," she said.
"I would just note that the problem with terrorism is that information is useful but it is not always something that you can prevent," Rice said.
ATTACKERS
Investigators have said the attacks were carried out by militants trained by the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba (L-e-T) group, also blamed for a 2001 attack on India's parliament.
U.S. officials say the attacks bear the hallmarks of operations undertaken by groups such as Lashkar-e-Taiba, Jaish-e-Mohammed and al Qaeda.
"While all the information is not in yet, it does appear at this point that the attackers had connections to Lashkar-e-Taiba," a U.S. counterterrorism official said.
"I don't think we can rule out al Qaeda, I just don't think we know at this point," another U.S. official said on condition of anonymity.
State Department spokesman Robert Wood noted that the FBI was part of a team investigating the attacks in India, but said it was too early to say who was behind the attacks.
"Pakistan ... needs to give its full, complete and transparent cooperation with the investigation into the Mumbai attacks and to follow leads wherever they may go," he said.
"Pakistan has said the right things. And it's pledged to investigate and to cooperate with this investigation that India's undertaking," he said. "And that's what we need. We need 100 percent effort."
Nepal and Kashmir Kevin Sites covered Nepal during a time of sweeping political change that followed mass nationwide protests, forcing the autocratic King to cede power. The nation was hopeful that new alliances and the Maoist rebels' return to the bargaining table would finally mark an end to their bloody insurgency. But in reports from Katmandu and Maoist territory, Sites found plenty of evidence that past abuses on both sides will make lasting peace a difficult commodity in Nepal.
Kashmir, one of the most beautiful regions on earth, is also one of the most dangerous. Sites covered Indian-controlled Kashmir amid daily outbreaks of violence, including a grenade attack on a tourist bus, even as the Indian Prime Minister visited the region for talks. The toll of the conflict could be seen in a shelter for widows and orphans, and even on the shores of Dal Lake, where families too poor to afford houses on land live on their fishing boats.
"A World of Conflict" is the documentary about the "Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone" project, in which veteran war correspondent Kevin Sites reported from every major global conflict in one year, in an effort to understand the costs of a world perpetually at war.
We are highlighting one chapter of the documentary each week in chronological order, allowing you to see the film in its entirety — exclusively online.
The documentary contains searing, never-before-seen images of combat and its lingering impact on civil society, beginning with the anarchy of Somalia in September 2005 and culminating with the explosive war between Israel and Hezbollah in summer 2006.
The documentary is included with Sites' new book, "In the Hot Zone: One Man. One Year. Twenty Wars." (The Harper Perennial paperback original is available now at Amazon.com and at book stores.)
Timeline of Israel's incursion into the Gaza Strip.
BBC News reports on Israel's military actions in Gaza.
Gaza Explainer
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Mumbai Attack Timeline
New details have been slowly emerging about the early stages of the Mumbai terror attacks. Much of the information has been gleaned after the capture of one of the militants involved, as the BBC's Prachi Pinglay reports from Mumbai.
The story of the Mumbai terror attacks likely began when a private fishing trawler with five crew members set sail from the Arabian sea off the coast of Porbandar in India's western Gujarat state on 13 November.
Sometime during the next 12 days, the trawler was taken over at sea by at least 10 young men, aged between 20 and 23 years, carrying backpacks and bags, according to sources in the Mumbai police, coastguard, and commandos.
Investigators still do not know what the men were sailing on and where they were coming from when they took over the trawler - though suspicion has fallen on the Pakistani port city of Karachi.
What they do know is that the men tied up one of the crew in the trawler's engine room, and slit his throat. The abandoned trawler was found by Indian coastguard ships more than three nautical miles off Mumbai.
GPS co-ordinates
When coastguards boarded the vessel, they found the dead crew member, plus a satellite phone and GPS tracker that possibly belonged to the trawler's crew.
Investigators told the BBC that the tracker showed "a return mapping for Karachi", leading to speculation that the men who attacked Mumbai had planned to return in the same trawler.
A ferry doing about 20 knots can cover the 506-nautical mile distance between Karachi and Mumbai in a little over 24 hours.
After abandoning the trawler, the men opened the inflatable dinghies they were carrying and sailed into Mumbai waters early on 26 November, a little more than 10 hours before the attack, investigators say.
An abandoned dinghy has been recovered in the sea off one of the many fishing colonies which dot the city's coast.
One of the top investigating officers told the BBC that the gunmen - nine were eventually killed and one arrested - split up into four groups and took the city's rickety black-and-yellow Fiat taxis from the fishing colony at Cuffe Parade to some of the locations they planned to attack.
They say the men left grenades or bombs inside the taxis before they got out. The taxis exploded soon after, killing two drivers and one bystander.
The first round of attacks took place around the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus or the Victoria Terminus railway station, when gunmen entered the platforms and fired on people indiscriminately.
They walked out of the station after the carnage, and shot three policemen and fired at journalists gathered near a cinema to record the event. Then they took a police van and drove off.
A flat tyre forced the gunmen to abandon the police van. The men then stole a Skoda car and drove towards the seafront Marine Drive, just as the other groups of gunmen were attacking a cafe, two luxury hotels and a Jewish cultural centre.
As the Skoda took a zig-zag route through the streets of Mumbai, the men inside opened fire in several locations - including at the Cama and Albless hospital for women and children.
Police say they intercepted the Skoda on the seafront and shot at it, killing one of the gunmen and arresting the other.
Twenty-one-year-old Mohammed Ajmal Mohammed Amir Kasar, who police says hails from Pakistan's Punjab province, is now the investigators' key to unravelling the planning that went into the attacks.
'Senseless violence'
Commandos who fought early pitched battles with the gunmen in the two luxury hotels, the Taj Mahal and Oberoi Trident, say that the lithe attackers moved quickly from room to room and climbed up and down floors to throw them off tracks.
The gunmen set fire to curtains and threw grenades to distract the commandos, according to federal commando chief JK Dutt.
"We found a lot of unexploded grenades inside the hotel. They damaged a lot of property. It was senseless violence," he said.
They also found lots of dry fruits, Indian and American currency, ammunition and fake Mumbai college student identity cards in the bags the gunmen had left behind during the attacks.
"We are checking whether the gunmen had any local support. But what we are sure is that they were not from India, and had trained in and were carrying stuff - AK-56, AK-47 and 9mm revolvers and hand grenades possibly of Chinese make," said an investigator.
The investigators say that Kasar has told them that their work was to "take hostages for safe passage". He also told them their aim was to "create an international incident, and anything big in Mumbai would be noticed all over the world".
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/south_asia/7757500.stm
Published: 2008/11/30 16:19:44 GMT
© BBC MMVIII
What is next for India?
India-Pakistan relations after the Mumbai Attacks
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Pakistan's Response to the Mumbai Attacks
**Who trained the Mumbai attack terrorists?**
Public Radio InternationalU.S. says Pakistani-based group likely hit Mumbai
Tue Dec 2, 2008 3:19pm ESThttp://www.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idUSTRE4B16S020081202?sp=true
[-] Text [+]
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A group based in Pakistan may have been responsible for the attacks by militants in India's financial hub of Mumbai that killed 183 people, a senior State Department official said on Tuesday.
The Pakistani government has offered to cooperate with India to find the attackers amid rising tensions between the two nuclear-armed rivals over the three-day assault at two luxury hotels and other landmarks.
"There are a lot of reasons to think it might be a group, partially or wholly a group, that is located on Pakistan's territory," the official told reporters on the sidelines of a meeting of NATO foreign ministers in Brussels.
The official, who did not identify the source of his information, spoke hours before U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was to leave for New Delhi to discuss last week's attacks with the Indian government.
Indian authorities were warned of an imminent attack by Islamist gunmen who would arrive by sea days before the Mumbai attacks, according to a senior coast guard source in India.
The owner of the city's Taj Mahal hotel, at the center of the militant assault, said he had also received a warning of a possible attack and had stepped up security.
U.S. officials would not publicly comment on reports that the United States had shared intelligence with India warning of a terrorism threat before the attacks, but privately acknowledged that threat information had been passed along.
ABCNews.com, quoting unnamed sources, said U.S. intelligence agencies warned their Indian counterparts in mid-October of a potential attack and specific locations, including the Taj hotel, were listed in the U.S. warning.
"Obviously we try to pass on information to countries all around the world when we pick up information," Rice said at a news conference in Brussels.
But sometimes information described as warnings "are often difficult to act on, sometimes not very concrete," she said.
"I would just note that the problem with terrorism is that information is useful but it is not always something that you can prevent," Rice said.
ATTACKERS
Investigators have said the attacks were carried out by militants trained by the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba (L-e-T) group, also blamed for a 2001 attack on India's parliament.
U.S. officials say the attacks bear the hallmarks of operations undertaken by groups such as Lashkar-e-Taiba, Jaish-e-Mohammed and al Qaeda.
"While all the information is not in yet, it does appear at this point that the attackers had connections to Lashkar-e-Taiba," a U.S. counterterrorism official said.
"I don't think we can rule out al Qaeda, I just don't think we know at this point," another U.S. official said on condition of anonymity.
State Department spokesman Robert Wood noted that the FBI was part of a team investigating the attacks in India, but said it was too early to say who was behind the attacks.
"Pakistan ... needs to give its full, complete and transparent cooperation with the investigation into the Mumbai attacks and to follow leads wherever they may go," he said.
"Pakistan has said the right things. And it's pledged to investigate and to cooperate with this investigation that India's undertaking," he said. "And that's what we need. We need 100 percent effort."
(Reporting by Sue Pleming in Brussels, additional reporting by Washington bureau; Editing by Alan Elsner and Cynthia Osterman)
© Thomson Reuters 2008 All rights reserved
Kevin Sites: A World of Conflict
Nepal and Kashmir
Kevin Sites covered Nepal during a time of sweeping political change that followed mass nationwide protests, forcing the autocratic King to cede power. The nation was hopeful that new alliances and the Maoist rebels' return to the bargaining table would finally mark an end to their bloody insurgency. But in reports from Katmandu and Maoist territory, Sites found plenty of evidence that past abuses on both sides will make lasting peace a difficult commodity in Nepal.
Kashmir, one of the most beautiful regions on earth, is also one of the most dangerous. Sites covered Indian-controlled Kashmir amid daily outbreaks of violence, including a grenade attack on a tourist bus, even as the Indian Prime Minister visited the region for talks. The toll of the conflict could be seen in a shelter for widows and orphans, and even on the shores of Dal Lake, where families too poor to afford houses on land live on their fishing boats.
"A World of Conflict" is the documentary about the "Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone" project, in which veteran war correspondent Kevin Sites reported from every major global conflict in one year, in an effort to understand the costs of a world perpetually at war.
We are highlighting one chapter of the documentary each week in chronological order, allowing you to see the film in its entirety — exclusively online.
The documentary contains searing, never-before-seen images of combat and its lingering impact on civil society, beginning with the anarchy of Somalia in September 2005 and culminating with the explosive war between Israel and Hezbollah in summer 2006.
The documentary is included with Sites' new book, "In the Hot Zone: One Man. One Year. Twenty Wars." (The Harper Perennial paperback original is available now at Amazon.com and at book stores.)